Far West

“Floyd Skloot is a maestro of fading plenitude. Moving through sweeping expanses of geography and imagination—through Central park, Elsinore, Dusseldorf, the Oregon Coast, the afterlife—Far West explores the mystery of what happens in the darkness of the skull and the vulnerability of the brain to time and violence. Skloot’s snapshots of past worlds slow down attention to do the work of real visitation, navigating the precarious relationship between naming and claiming so fluently that it is easy to ‘believe his steady/song.’” ~Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

“Experience, memory, and language—that holy trinity of our being—enact their dance of meaning in these lucid, thickly-textured narratives and deft sonnets. There’s an ontological tenderness about these poems—it doesn’t have to do with anything obvious—they’re the opposite of sentimental, but their ambition is to acknowledge and transfigure even the fiercest or saddest of personalities—whether they are the poet’s distant father and harsh mother, or historical figures (Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling house-hunting by bicycle). Under Skloot’s alert scrutiny, things, people, and creatures are radiant and mundane at the same time, and the holiness of our ordinary world is profoundly evoked.” ~Gregory Orr, author of A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry